Now and Then: The Sound of Coventry's Story

Now and Then’ is a collaboration between video makers, photographers and composer to make a 360 immersive video with binaural soundscape for VR headset for the Being Human Festival 2021 that explored immersive technologies that enhanced notions of being human. Themes of heritage and present-day city life, through the experiences of residents during the Coventry blitz in 1940, when much of the city was destroyed, underpin the work. The VR ‘Now and Then’ was made using archival recordings of Coventry people who had had first-hand experience of the bombing, with images taken of Coventry then and now, plus contemporary audio recordings of the city. The video work had both AI and human creators to create landscapes of image these were then centred in the ruins of the cathedral. The electroacoustic soundscape by Tom Williams is a montage of past and present that is interlinked, juxtaposed and deconstructed to uncover narratives and resonances in the immediacy of the moment. 

Voice Recordings reproduced by kind permission of Culture Coventry Trust, Coventry Archives.
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